Celebrity neurologist Oliver Sacks is known for the non-fiction books that detail his cerebrally irregular patients, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (featuring the most famous account of visual agnosia ever put to paper) and An Anthropologist on Mars. Now a professor of clinical psychiatry and clinical neurology at Columbia, he's since published Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.

Born in London, Sacks moved to New York as soon as he got his BM BCh, the British equivalent of an MD, and has been practicing neurology in the city ever since. A long time instructor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he joined Columbia's faculty in 2007 while additionally being granted Columbia's first "Columbia University Artist" title, honoring his ability to bridge the arts and sciences. A regular contributor to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, the New York Times once called him a "poet laureate for contemporary medicine." Known for his depth of narrative detail, some of his best-known books include Awakenings, which later became an Academy Award nominated film of the same name and starred Robert De Niro, and Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, which inspired an entire episode of PBS's Nova. [Image via Getty]